20/20

Half-time for the year from hades

The disasters of 2020 — pandemic, recession, and riots — are all self-inflicted wounds.

They stem from one-sided beliefs that are insulated from facts and shared by millions of people.

The revolutionary fervor in the air points to more trouble ahead, especially as the US election approaches.

“It was the worst of times … it was the age of foolishness … it was the epoch of incredulity … it was the season of Darkness … it was the winter of despair”

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

What a Year

It is difficult to describe this year as anything but a truly unmitigated disaster — and it is not even half over.

We have been treated to the most hysterical reaction to a pandemic ever, the fastest and deepest economic dislocation in 300 years, and the greatest public policy error of all time.

Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and hundreds of millions of people are unemployed.

At least half of the population of the planet has been under extended periods of near-house arrest and the way forward in most countries will continue to relieve us of some portion of our economic and civic liberties.

And now, owing to the callous death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis Police officers, and subsequent protests, we are in the very earliest stages of the political retribution from these events.

So far, that involves more deaths, extensive property damage, outraged protesters, and bitter recriminations.

And that’s only in the US, where protesters are the teeny tiniest slice of that country’s mere 4% of the planet’s inhabitants. The political reaction of the rest of the world to the events of early 2020 is yet to come.

Pointy Fingers

The most shocking thing to consider in this litany of disaster is that all of it is self-inflicted.

We see ourselves as victims of mighty impersonal forces, but the truth is that we are every bit as much instigators of our misfortune. For all of the fear of contagion, we are the actual agents of change.

Many of us chose to create the year from hades:

The coronavirus mutation came from some sort of misguided interaction between people and nature, whether lab- or wet market-originated.

The Chinese and other national leaders then essentially sat on their hands while the pandemic gained steam.

Later, almost every government on earth opted to consciously shut down the economy and our personal freedoms, thus creating massive job losses and bankruptcies.

This led to every organization on the planet permanently distorting their operations, even as the pandemic ebbed away to a more manageable level in most places.

Lately, people on the fringes of protest have robbed and burnt inner-cities, leaving them less able to recover, even within the small measure of post-pandemic re-opening allowed by our political masters.

In chronological order, George Floyd died, protesters and rioters assembled, the police confronted the crowd, the crowd fought back, the rioters robbed, maimed and killed, and politicians of various stripes pointed the blame in all directions but one.

So, at just about mid-year, we have a health, economic, fiscal, social, and political fiasco that actually seems to be gaining a head of steam by the day. What a time to be alive!

So Many Questions

The exceptional turmoil of this year understandably has people asking deep questions like never before, particularly concerning whether Big Things are afoot.

Are we seeing the fruition of long developing trends, albeit in a brand new way because of our on-line 24/7 global village and hyper-politicization of every issue?

Perhaps some ungodly combination of populism, nationalism, social media, and plain ignorance is driving people to extreme actions?

Is this a momentous year like 1815, 1848, 1914, 1945, or 1989, a revolutionary turning point into some dimly sensed emerging paradigm? It sure feels like that’s true.

What about blaming this on decadence and a declining civilization, with all of us too comfortable and complacent and focused on petty issues to see that important civic responsibilities need to be defended?

Or, how about the inevitable consequences of a big pendulum swing in meta-forces, like climate, markets, bureaucracy, politics, or capitalism?

Or, is this all grossly exaggerated and unconnected and just a really bad example of “sh!t happens”?

As someone recently said, we need to “figure out what the hell is going on”.

Mind over Matters

The short answer for me to all of these questions is “partly, yes”.

All of the big trends and meta-forces listed above are accelerating, as they do in today’s extraordinarily interconnected world, and there is no doubt that revolutionary fervor is in the air, at least among the body of activists who hit the streets.

However, people at large have been awfully complacent throughout the period of lockdown and that is perhaps the best forward indicator of continuing noisy but relatively civil peace.

We do have a relatively soft society and so governments and intense special interests generally have the upper hand. However, the quiet majority will have the last word on politics and public policy and the coming US election will show the true state of mind of the electorate.

And the theory that stuff happens is quite valid, history being described as “just one damn thing after another”. We can see that clearly this year in the way that governments serially followed each other into lockdown and how protests spread from one place to another over the course of a few days.

But I think the overriding factor to explain this year’s events, as usual, can be found in our minds: how we think and, based on that, how we act. Get millions or billions of humans thinking and acting in the same way, and it is a mighty force indeed.

It is noteworthy that the protagonists in each of the separate, though linked, crises of 2020 are invisible: fear of contagion, expectation of mass death, anticipation of economic depression, and belief in widespread racism.

They are all shared community ideas that live in our heads and they have caused us to behave in ways that have profoundly hurt each other.

We feared the coronavirus and so triggered a social panic. Our leaders foresaw loss of life and then shut down the economy. Businesses saw the writing on the wall and laid off millions of workers. Everyday people saw police brutality and then marched on the city.

In a perverse effect, the rarer the event — death by virus or death by cop — the more attention and emotion was drawn to the underlying social issues. We were most freaked out by the most unlikely occurrences.

One mutation and one video have led to profound changes in the lives of billions and it is all based on shared intangible ideas.

Why Believe

An immediate response to this view that we collectively talked ourselves into disaster is that the ideas that drove us there were sound and we were right to take extreme action on that basis.

It does not take much to dispel such a notion.

The fear of contagion was sensible at first, given the wildfire pace seen in Wuhan. However, it was known very early on that there was a huge age and co-morbidity skew to the death statistics. That alone should have allowed the vast majority of people to put the risk into proper perspective and choose a superior policy course: isolation for the vulnerable and minimal restrictions on the rest.

Likewise, the decision to lockdown the economy was based on epidemiological models that projected coming catastrophe. They were largely debunked within weeks and yet the lockdowns continued.

Did our leaders actually believe that they could predict the pandemic’s future with precision? And could they not imagine that massive job and business losses would emerge with a prolonged lockdown, especially given the example of the Great Recession only ten years ago? If so, we really do have weak hands at the tiller.

The business reaction to crashing financial markets and dramatic sales declines is easier to understand. It is also a waterfall problem, where the negative actions of a few drive many others to respond, until there is a raging torrent crashing down on all firms. This year, that cascade emerged over the course of only a few short weeks, a shockingly abrupt transition.

Finally, the issues of racism and police behavior.

The apprehension of George Floyd is crystal clear from the video: he was identified as a criminal suspect, was not sober, resisted arrest, and the police used cruel and excessive force that caused his death.

There is nothing in the evidence to indicate a racist incident, including the different races of the cops involved, and everything that points to police brutality.

The death of one person does not prove systemic racism and, in fact, the overall US numbers point in another direction. Nor is it true to say that racism does not exist at all or that society or life is fair or just. However, the claim of pervasive racism is highly contentious and ultimately unprovable, since it seeks to look within our hearts and societies for evil intent.

Facts Don’t Matter

Whether you accept or reject the facts and analysis presented above, the more important point to make by far is that this evidence or logic doesn’t matter one whit.

All people have beliefs and those beliefs are never necessarily aligned with the true state of reality, but rather only with a personal perception of reality. Most people do not have the time or interest to delve deeply into issues of public importance.

They often get their views from preconceived ideas and it is more correct to say that they believe because of who they are, not what they know. Their beliefs are often fact-free (or fact-light). It is not a far stretch to say that people believe anew because of what they already believe.

This is not a judgement on people but rather a comment on how things really work.

People did not fear the coronavirus because they read scientific reports out of China and Italy; they hid away from each other because they believed that a deadly risk threatened themselves and their families.

Activists are not protesting racism because of their knowledge of justice statistics; they are outraged because they see a personal injustice and that deeply offends their values. The widespread use of the mythical but powerful “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture at protests is the most recent example that facts do not really matter when it comes to such strong beliefs.

People believe and then they act on those beliefs. Tally up those reactions by the millions and, when they are one-sided, you get mass behavior that kills economies, damages property, and destroys lives.

Second Half

With this experience from the first half of 2020, we should probably keep our helmets on for the second half, especially given the highly politicized US election to come.

There are also widespread expectations of another pandemic wave, a stumble in the nascent economic recovery, geopolitical tensions with China, the possibility of Brexit failure, and, of course, a rise in populist tensions everywhere with the drop in respect for authority.

By the way, 20/20, a word play on insight into 2020, means that someone has normal vision, with their eyesight equivalent to the average person’s at twenty feet away.

It does not reflect perfect vision in any way.

Like every other idea reviewed here, many of us say 20/20 is perfection without knowing the truth. And we keep believing and repeating it anyway.

Here’s to the rest of a memorable year to come.